Horror in Sandy Hook

The horror of the shooting in the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., is the only thing that’s real as this is written, less than four hours after the news of the tragedy broke. There soon will be many savants commenting on what we can learn in this country about violence, gun control, police response, heroes and the innocent dead. We can’t claim to add anything real to those discussions. We don’t know anything, although we fervently hope that this tragedy gets no closer to our community than the television screen, the Facebook feed and the newspaper headlines.

But it’s impossible not to note the behavior of the media, and we can predict with some certainty where some of the coverage will go—we’ve seen it before. The media inveigle the American news consumer with misstatements about the danger in schools, about the necessity of new restrictions on gun ownership, and about how one political party or the other is the root cause of this violence. How many times will the initials NRA come up in upcoming weeks? Oh wait, it looks like the media is leaning toward attributing this mass murder to violent video games. We can predict that the media will continue to inform us with incorrect “facts,” which may eventually become the true legend of the Sandy Hook shooting, and may eventually lead to bad legislation.

Whatever happened to the days when it was more important for reporters to be right than first? As the coverage progressed this morning, the number of errors presented as facts by the media has been incalculable.

First, in the matter of the dead and wounded, numbers started at zero killed and worked their way to 27 killed, then back to 26. The wounded, too, varied wildly in number and still hasn’t settled. Misinformation in the effort to be the first to break the news is utterly irresponsible.

Even at this moment, we don’t know who the shooter was. Many news outlets first reported that 24-year-old Ryan Lanza was the shooter. The media even told us he was in police custody and being questioned. Except that other “news” sources were telling us the killer was dead. Ryan Lanza’s image, stolen from his Facebook page, was blasted all over the internet. The fact is, in those traumatic, formative moments, this became the face of the killer of that kindergarten class. (Turns out they were first graders.)

He wasn’t the killer. Right now, it appears he is the killer’s older brother, and the media is telling us that Adam Lanza, 20, is the real killer. But the media has been so wrong, so quickly, that we can’t say whether he was or not. Or if he’s dead. Or if he’s dead by his own hand.

One thing we know to be true does not appear in any of the headlines: A mentally ill person proved that he or she did not get necessary help.

Will this massacre result in heightened security in schools? Probably. Will the NRA get part of the blame for this catastrophe? Probably. Will the media continue to get crucial facts wrong in the reporting of this? Probably. Will our nation take up the fact that mental illness is ignored by us as a culture to the detriment of our children?